How to Use dunce in a Sentence

dunce

noun
  • Delicate ceramic works—a dunce cap on a stool, a wall clock with no hands—evoke fragility.
    — The New Yorker, 31 Mar. 2017
  • The nerd next door who's a whiz in geometry and a dunce in relationships.
    — Neal Justin, Star Tribune, 25 Mar. 2021
  • For some reason, a dunce in the editing room added an explanatory whirring noise on the soundtrack.
    — Darren Franich, EW.com, 14 Sep. 2020
  • To be sure, the Tories have had more than their fair share of Chris Grayling-style dunces and time-servers.
    — The Economist, 18 Dec. 2019
  • The next day, a New York tabloid put Manning’s face on its back page with a dunce cap perched atop his head.
    — Bill Pennington, New York Times, 9 Dec. 2016
  • The funny thing about all this mickey-the-dunce defense from all these esteemed Democrats is that most of them are lawyers.
    — Howie Carr, Boston Herald, 31 Aug. 2025
  • Pena insists that his path to success, power, and money started in grammar school, when he was forced to wear a dunce hat.
    — Los Angeles Times, 19 Apr. 2021
  • Anyway, bullying is bad, but dunce caps removed from their original context are good.
    — Vulture, 29 Apr. 2022
  • So, yes, let Spencer enjoy his First Amendment right to preach hate to his legion of dunces -- free and out in the open.
    — Byron McCauley, Cincinnati.com, 17 Oct. 2017
  • The professors wore tall paper dunce caps and looked as shocked as the spectators, who watched from the university’s lawn, some with tears in their eyes.
    — Marty Judge Community Voices Contributor, San Diego Union-Tribune, 20 Mar. 2021
  • Experienced seamen were in high demand at the time, and I’d been left with a bunch of landlubbers, green hands, and shore dunces.
    — Mike O’Brien, The New Yorker, 7 Nov. 2023
  • In my view, the biggest mistake scientists make is to claim that this is all somehow simple and therefore to imply that anyone who doesn't get it is a dunce.
    — Naomi Oreskes, Scientific American, 21 June 2021
  • Fred, meanwhile, is a mega-wealthy dunce who comes across as too helpless and hapless to grow into the ghostbusting leading man he’s supposed to become.
    — Joshua Alston, Variety, 11 Jan. 2023
  • Despite his very real affection for his mother-in-law, Lee found his father-in-law an amiable but annoying dunce.
    — Allen C. Guelzo, National Review, 17 Sep. 2020
  • Will our entire cadre of older faculty members morph from larger-than-life sages into teeny little pariahs wearing dunce caps?
    — Anne Fadiman, Wired, 17 June 2020
  • Unfortunately for their students, these demented dunces still don’t have their acts together.
    — Chuck Barney, The Mercury News, 15 Jan. 2017
  • Jardel flopped at Bolton, drifted off into obscurity and is now remembered as a Premier League dunce.
    — SI.com, 27 Aug. 2019
  • At some point, all of original architect’s Jackson Gott’s fancy tile roofs and dunce-cap like decorative towers got chopped off.
    — Jacques Kelly, baltimoresun.com, 9 Nov. 2019
  • The coming elite would recognize the con of mass education and spare millions the dunce hat of the community college or the online university.
    — Thomas Meaney, Harper's magazine, 20 Jan. 2020
  • How could a society judge each individual on his or her own merits when rich dunces enjoyed the best educations and poor geniuses left school as children to work as chimney sweeps?
    — John Micklethwait, Foreign Affairs, 29 May 2014
  • But step into their britches; to be smartphone-era dunces careening into the singularity must be excruciating.
    — Mary H. K. Choi, WIRED, 1 Nov. 2011
  • The instant a Presidential election is over, everyone who worked on the losing campaign is recast as a dunce, and everyone on the winning side is reborn as a genius.
    — Andrew Marantz, The New Yorker, 2 Mar. 2020
  • Reagan was famously called an amiable dunce, and that was unfair, but Reagan understood something [his predecessor] Carter did not.
    — Lorraine Boissoneault, Smithsonian, 9 May 2017
  • Most adamant in their stances are permabulls and permabears who cherry-pick the latest economic indicators to create the illusion that only a dunce could possibly disagree with them.
    — Martin Fridson, Forbes, 16 May 2022
  • What started as casual brutality—class enemies forced to wear ridiculous dunce caps or stand in stress positions—degenerated into outright sadism.
    — Barbara Demick, The Atlantic, 18 Dec. 2020
  • Ermengarde, the school dunce, Lottie, the school crybaby, and Becky, the scullery maid, quickly find a defender, surrogate mother, and friend in Sara.
    — Sarah Schutte, National Review, 13 Mar. 2022
  • Or, having sat mutely on its metaphorical dunce chair at the back of the class, can The Cosby Show ever be rerun on network television once its serial-rapist star has also served his time?
    — Lionel Shriver, Harper's magazine, 10 Feb. 2019
  • Corenswet originally auditioned for Ricardo, a role that Benjamin Barrett crafted into a mustachioed dunce to brilliant comedic effect.
    — Maureen Lee Lenker, EW.com, 26 Nov. 2019
  • The series has a cockeyed political perspective, flooding nefarious Democratic operatives alongside its Trumpling dunce-caps.
    — Darren Franich, EW.com, 9 Apr. 2020
  • When the original writer walked off, Spiegel connected Lean with playwright Robert Bolt, an important collaborator who, like the director, was the product of a puritanical childhood, during which he was considered the dunce of the family.
    — David Rooney, HollywoodReporter, 27 May 2026

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'dunce.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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